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70 But how am I to divide the nineteenth century in its turn? And here in Baltimore, the city of which Edgar Poe was a native and where he rests, shall I make the concession of encouraging the sympathy I am told they feel for the Baudelaires and the Verlaines? Heaven forbid! On the contrary, what I have said of Verlaine and Baudelaire in France I will repeat, merely taking account of the fact that in the conception they have formed of poetry there is something vaguely analogous to the idea, at once mystic and sensual, which the Anglo-Saxon genius seems to have formed of it now and again. And, moreover, as this idea has been developed amongst us in contrast, or even in declared hostility, to the Parnassian idea, I will explain what has been intended by the poets who have been designated in France as Parnassians. And necessarily, the far too large part granted nowadays to romanticism, in the movement of the times, will be proportionately reduced. All Europe, however, has had its "Romanticists;" and to show what analogy Musset bears to Byron will not require a long discourse. Besides, whatever one may think respectively of the Poèmes Barbares or the Poèmes Antiques and the Légende des siècles, there are at least as many "novelties" in the arnassian theory as in the Romantic. And that will answer for my three final lectures, in the first of which I will attempt to define the romantic movement in itself and in relation to English or German romanticism; in the second I will show how and why the "Parnassians" have so far differed from the "Romanticists" as to become their living contradiction; and, finally, in the third, I will connect with symbolism the new tendencies I think I discern in contemporary poetry

In what relates to the organization of universities, the professors, whose kindness is inexhaustible, are here to rectify or redress what, without them, might be superficial or erroneous in my observation. It is by the aid of their conversations and their publications that I wish to say a few words on a subject which has its importance and its difficulties.

Concerning this subject, let us remember, in the first place, that institutions of superior instructions are not all of the same type in France, whatever the Germans appear to think about it, when one finds the editors of their Minerva jumbling in the uniformity of one continuous enumeration the Polytechnic School, the University of Paris, and the Museum of Natural History. The Museum of Natural History, the former Jardin du Roi, from which the great name of Buffon is inseparable, is one of the very rare institutions which are devoted amongst us to the cult of pure and disinterested science. No examinations are passed there, no diplomas or certificates are conferred; and it neither conducts nor leads to anything but an acquaintance with natural history. This is also the originality of the Collège de France. One learns nothing immediately practical there, and even the Chinese which is taught is not the Chinese which is spoken. Our universities are already more "utilitarian;" they grant diplomas, and these diplomas, which may have a great scientific value, have before all else a state valuation. They are at once—and this is their great vice—the official sanction of studies and a title to a career. Our universities form lawyers, physicians, and professors, and it is all the better if savants or learned men issue from them; but thus far they have not been adapted for that purpose. Finally, the great schools, such as the École polytechnique or the École Normale Supérieure, are not, properly speaking, anything but professional schools, whose first object, whose principal object, is to provide for the recruiting of certain great public employments, so that if their regulations should be heedlessly altered, the quality of this recruitment would be compromised and the entire category of great employments modified in its foundations.

There are likewise different types of American universities. There are State universities—like the University of Virginia, for instance; or the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor)—which are independent, no doubt, in the sense that they manage themselves absolutely, and yet whose independence is in some respect limited by the grant they receive from the States. Their principal obligations are to admit to the university course, without previous examination, pupils who come from the high schools of Michigan or Virginia, and to establish alongside of their liberal instruction, technical training—scientific agriculture, for example—or legal or medical courses.

Other universities, generally the oldest ones, like Harvard, 1655; Yale, 1701;